VKnowU is a benchmark that tests multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on their grasp of visual knowledge—intuitive, human-like understanding of physical and social principles in videos. The benchmark contains 1,680 questions across 1,249 videos, covering eight core types of visual knowledge, and shows that current state‑of‑the‑art MLLMs still lag behind human performance, especially on world‑centric tasks. To address this gap, the authors release VKnowQA and VideoKnow+, a baseline model that incorporates visual knowledge via a See‑Think‑Answer framework and reinforcement learning, improving performance on VKnowU and related datasets.
By Tianxiang Jiang, Sheng Xia, Yicheng Xu, Linquan Wu, Xiangyu Zeng, Limin Wang, Yu Qiao, Yi Wang
The paper introduces CAIT, a benchmark of 400 synthetic scenes featuring counter‑intuitive actions that challenge multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Human participants and proprietary models like Claude and Gemini perform well, but standard open‑source instruction‑tuned MLLMs fail, largely due to a strong language prior that overrides contradictory visual evidence. The study shows that Chain‑of‑Thought reasoning can help but introduces new issues, while targeted fine‑tuning and structured prompting can reduce reliance on language priors and improve visual grounding.
By Chen Ling, Tongwei Zhang, Hanqian Li, Nai Ding
arXiv:2607. 26769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly use sketches, annotations, tools, and intermediate images during reasoning, but it remains unclear whether they truly rely on these visual states.
By Siyu Yan, Zhuoran Yan, Haiying Xu, Panhao Zhou, Jingyu Chen, Chenhao Ji, Shuo Cao, Yongheng Zhang, Haoze Liu, Siyu Zhang, Xiwen Gu, Yihao Liu, Alex Jinpeng Wang
The paper introduces VISTA, a visual harness that equips a general-purpose multimodal model with long‑horizon vision and a lossless visual memory. VISTA enables the model to directly perceive and actively retrieve past observations, allowing it to reorganize visual input during reasoning. On the ARC‑AGI‑3 benchmark, VISTA boosts Claude Opus 5.0’s Relative Human Action Efficiency from 40.68 to a perfect 100.00, completing all 25 public games with 57.4% fewer actions than first‑time human participants, and it also outperforms baselines on three additional visual game and puzzle benchmarks.
By Qiushi Han, Keya Hu, Linlu Qiu, Cathy Wu, Kaiming He
arXiv:2608. 13113v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have led to substantial progress in video understanding, accompanied by a growing number of long video benchmarks.
By Weitao Chen, Hu Jiaxin, Xie Tianyidan, Yang Li, Yuyi Qian, Banghao Xu, Ziheng Tang, Shenyi Wang, Mingyue Yu, Duo Li, Jiacheng Shi, Gao Wang, Zhan Xu, Zhicheng Qiu, Xuanfu Li, Jian Yang, Lanjun Wang, Zili Yi
arXiv:2605.26380v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been reported to achieve over 90\% accuracy on fine-grained perception benchmarks. How...
By Jingru Chen, Yiming Liu, Mingtao Chen, Sijie Chen, Richeng Xuan, Liang Yang, Zhichao Hu, Fanyang Lu
arXiv:2505. 21457v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Active vision, also known as active perception, refers to actively selecting where and how to look in order to gather task-relevant information.
By Muzhi Zhu, Hao Zhong, Canyu Zhao, Zongze Du, Mingyu Liu, Zheng Huang, Anzhou Li, Hao Chen, Cheng Zou, Jingdong Chen, Ming Yang, Chunhua Shen
arXiv:2606. 00148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often know the rule but pick the wrong answer: on abstract visual reasoning (AVR) tasks, a model can describe what it sees and name the underlying pattern, yet still fail to choose the matching candidate.
By Xixiang He, Baiqi Wu, Xingming Li, Ao Cheng, Qiyao Sun, Xuanyu Ji, Qingyong Hu
arXiv:2609.05517v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Human observers prioritize visual information according to task goals. Most computational models of naturalistic viewing are gaze-trained for free vi...
By Han Zhang
arXiv:2606. 03005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite rapid progress, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still fail on tasks that humans solve effortlessly, such as navigating a grid maze from a screenshot or selecting the correct puzzle piece.
By Jianglin Lu, Hailing Wang, Xu Ma, Qihua Dong, Mingyuan Zhang, Yizhou Wang, Yun Fu
arXiv:2602. 00593v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite progress on general tasks, vision-language models (VLMs) still struggle with challenges that demand both fine-grained visual grounding and external knowledge, a synergy overlooked by existing benchmarks that evaluate these abilities in isolation.
By Yifan Jiang, Cong Zhang, Bofei Zhang, Qiaofeng Zheng, Yifan Yang, Bingzhang Wang, Yew-Soon Ong
arXiv:2609.22588v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) perform strongly on visual question answering benchmarks, yet often make decisions that contradict visual evidence they h...
By Yuyang Dai, Bofei Huang, Hongbo Zhang, Haoran Xie